Designing Transparency Cues in Online News Platforms to Promote Trust: Journalists' & Consumers' Perspectives

TL;DR

This study explores how transparency cues in online news platforms, based on interviews with journalists and consumers, can enhance trust by revealing source credibility, evidence, and process details, informing better design practices.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into stakeholder perspectives on transparency indicators and offers design considerations for trustworthy online news platforms.

Findings

Consumers favor objectivity and evidence indicators

Journalists suggest additional transparency in reporting process and conflicts of interest

Design recommendations include clear presentation of corrections and cross-organization comparisons

Abstract

As news organizations embrace transparency practices on their websites to distinguish themselves from those spreading misinformation, HCI designers have the opportunity to help them effectively utilize the ideals of transparency to build trust. How can we utilize transparency to promote trust in news? We examine this question through a qualitative lens by interviewing journalists and news consumers -- the two stakeholders in a news system. We designed a scenario to demonstrate transparency features using two fundamental news attributes that convey the trustworthiness of a news article: source and message. In the interviews, our news consumers expressed the idea that news transparency could be best shown by providing indicators of objectivity in two areas (news selection and framing) and by providing indicators of evidence in four areas (presence of source materials, anonymous sourcing, verification, and corrections upon erroneous reporting). While our journalists agreed with news consumers' suggestions of using evidence indicators, they also suggested additional transparency indicators in areas such as the news reporting process and personal/organizational conflicts of interest. Prompted by our scenario, participants offered new design considerations for building trustworthy news platforms, such as designing for easy comprehension, presenting appropriate details in news articles (e.g., showing the number and nature of corrections made to an article), and comparing attributes across news organizations to highlight diverging practices. Comparing the responses from our two stakeholder groups reveals conflicting suggestions with trade-offs between them. Our study has implications for HCI designers in building trustworthy news systems.